With the rapid development of Internet and cloud computing technology, information technology enters an era of big data. The amount of data to be processed in various industries and fields increases dramatically. Users require storage servers which serve as data nodes to have high reliability for data protection and high availability for data reading/writing.
Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) is a standard for buses and interfaces. A PCIe bus is a point-to-point serial connection approach for connecting devices, and handles communications in a point-to-point manner. Each device establishes its own transmission channel when data needs to be transmitted. The transmission channel is closed to other devices. As such, exclusiveness of the channel is ensured, and interference from other devices is avoided. The most profound significance of the PCIe bus lies in its versatility, which enables it to be used not only for connecting a southbridge with other devices but also for connecting chip sets and even for connecting graphic chips. In this way, the entire Input/Output (I/O) system will be reunified, computer systems will be further simplified, and transportability and modularity of computers will be improved.
However, as one kind of PCIe products, most of the existing PCIe storage cards are dedicatedly used for either local storage or network storage, but do not support both local storage and network storage.